Everyone Needs an Emotional Turtle Shell

When the storms of life rage, the paycheck-to-paycheck style of emotional living will leave us feeling empty.

Always on the Emotional Edge

With finances, people mistakenly assume that times will stay as good as they are now — that there’s no need to worry about things like emergency preparedness, food storage, emergency funds, and contingency plans. We do the same thing with the mental and emotional side of things. All of us can benefit from building up and maintaining an emotional turtle shell — a reinforced core to our emotional structure that we can rely on when times get tough.

The unpredictable winds of life can blow away everything we so carefully build. We need to have something solid at the center that can’t be taken away from us, where we can emotionally survive the toughest storms.

We thrive in environments where we get to feel like we’re in control. As long as things in life are rolling along smoothly, we can settle down and get comfortable and extend our emotional tentacles into all the various aspects of life. As soon as something starts going wrong, the entire web of emotional investments that we’ve been making get’s shaken. The solid materials we thought we were leaning upon turn out to be just wisps in the wind and we’re stumbling to catch our balance through the smoke.

A career gets derailed, a family member dies, or our health takes a sharp downward turn. These out-of-our-control circumstances dispel the illusion of control and we realize that our beautiful emotional mansion was really just a toothpick shack. Even minor daily setbacks can make that realization happen on a small scale. A simple recurring problem at work might leave me feeling lost and directionless. It will feel like I’ve been following a sure signal that’s been guiding my feet, but suddenly I’ve lost it and I’m not sure which direction I’m meant to take the next step.

I realize in those moments that I’m floundering because I’ve been neglecting my emotional emergency preparedness. I feel like I’m grasping at the wind because I’m missing a solid foundation to rely on. I’ve either neglected to build one or I’ve left it somewhere far behind. I’ve been putting all my weight on the secondary branches of life, and when one of those branches cracks or snaps my heart starts pounding a million miles an hour and I frantically reach for something reassuring, like waking up after falling in a dream.

When it happens I am almost disappointed with myself. I should have been better emotionally prepared. Something so small shouldn’t be affecting me so much. It shouldn’t take so long for me to feel oriented in life again. I should not have neglected to spend time and attention on keeping my emotional turtle shell in working order. If I had, I would have had something solid to hold on to — something that couldn’t have been taken away from me by external circumstances outside my control.

The Food Storage Packing List

Putting together an effective emotional emergency preparedness plan is a lot like how you’d put together a physical emergency preparedness plan. For example, it’s not something you put together all at once; it’s something you slowly build out and add to over time. Also, with your food storage you have to check back in often enough to rotate the supplies so they’re always up-to-date and haven’t spoiled. Likewise, with your emotional core you have to work on it often enough that it stays relevant to your life and hasn’t faded away or been forgotten to the past.

Just like with maintaining a good food storage, there’s as list of things you need to include for an effective emotional emergency plan.

You also have to make sure that you have everything you need for it to be self sustaining. That means you should have all the pieces that you’d need if you had to depend on that for 100% of your needs for a length of time. You’ll never have completely stable footing unless your foundation accounts for all the ways you might stand on it.

If all the various activities of your life were taken away from you, how would you cope? Is there a frame of reference that you can fall back on that would continue to give you purpose and fulfillment? If not, it’s like you’re living paycheck to paycheck without a food storage. Or it’s like you only have cans but forgot to have a can opener stashed with them. Maybe you only kept buckets of wheat and rice in your food storage, but when the emergency happens you find you’d rather starve than actually eat any of it?

If we got as serious about emotional emergency preparedness as we do about physical emergency preparedness, we’d have healthier coping mechanisms.

Filling the Void before Something else does

The emotional coping in your life has to be something you can actually turn to and rely on, but it also has to be something that aligns with your long-term goals. Plenty of vices are waiting in the wings to swoop down and offer their hand for you to grasp on to when you a floundering. Unless you have something better prepared, it’s going to be awfully hard to ignore them. If, on the other hand, you’ve prepared a solid emotional turtle shell defense at the center of your life, you can become good at turning to that to fill the void in times of emotional crisis when other things fall away.

You can prevent yourself from always falling back into the same bad old habits when times get stressful. You can have a durable sense of your identity as a person that isn’t subject to the changing circumstances around you. You’ll always have an established frame of mind to approach the unexpected issues that arise. You’ll be able to maintain a solid foundation that you can push off from when life pushes you down under the waves.

Sometimes I’ll have a frustrating wave of setbacks that puts me in an emotional fog where nothing seems satisfying anymore. I have a hard time letting things go so I can move on. I become more irritable because I’m not getting fulfilled by my trajectory but I also can’t seem to reorient myself and move in a different direction. It’s like my feet can’t feel the bottom through the water so I’m afraid to let go of the sinking wreck of my own extraneous pursuits.

It’s times like that when I find I’m most likely to turn to the things that give me a sense of control, even if they aren’t the best for my long-term success. Like video games or social media scrolling. They’re easy to turn on and give me a sense of having a life-line of emotional safety, but they aren’t structurally strong enough to keep me afloat. That’s why I feel so empty at the end of the day when I’ve relied too much on them.

It seems like a universal trait we all have. We need to feel like we have control over our lives. If external circumstances take that sense of control away, we tend to fall back on other things that can help return that sense of control, even if those other things are bad for us.

I need something that fires me up instead of emptying me out. I need something that instills me with a stronger sense of purpose and encourages me to get back out there and continue trying to grow and develop. I need that emotional turtle shell behind which I can maintain a durable sense of my own personal identity. I can venture out when times are good, but I can keep the connection strong so I can pull back in when things start going bad.

Responsible Preparation or Complacent Comfort Zone?

For the sake of clarity, I want to make a side note that keeping our feet on a sure emotional foundation is different from sticking to our comfort zone. Staying in our comfort zone would stall our progress, which is not the point of emotional resilience.

Responsible Emotional Emergency Preparedness, on the other hand, has more to do with figuring out how to create a reliable core to our emotional framework that’s based on something entirely in our control. Once we’ve got the load-bearing central pillar set up, we can venture outside our comfort zone with more confidence knowing that we can extend out further by building upon the strength of the central piece.

It also means that when the unpredictable consequences of leaving our comfort zone start to rock the boat, we don’t have to panic and turn back out of fear of drowning. We’ll know we’ve got our critical bases covered.

A good emotional framework to build on means we don’t have to rethink our identity every time things don’t go the way we planned. We have a way to orient ourselves that doesn’t need to change based on our successes and failures.

The Most Important Piece of my Emergency Supplies

As for myself, I approach this problem mainly from a religious perspective. I follow Jesus Christ, and His teachings and perspectives are like a nutrient-rich soil for turtle-shell gardening.

I’m mashing up my metaphors there, but the point is that a true understanding of God’s purpose for me has always been a steady, solid foundation that can withstand the toughest storms of life. In the normal course of life I tend to build up little Potemkin Villages to emotionally lean on, but those are just facades that easily fall away when push comes to shove. When I instead put my weight behind the rock of the Gospel of Jesus Christ I find a solid and reliable source of purpose that propagates throughout all the other aspects of my life.

What you Need in a Good Emotional Turtle Shell

My relationship with Jesus Christ has all the necessary elements of a good emotional turtle shell, and when I remember to stay close to Him I can take advantage of all the benefits that having that emotional refuge provides. These examples are specifically about how it works for me, but I think the principles apply broadly even outside of a religious context, to whatever people might find makes a good emotional core for themselves.

I happen to think that Jesus Christ makes the best emotional core for one’s life, but either way there has to be SOMETHING at your center that you can depend on as your source of validation and purpose when the fickle things of life let you down.